We all turn off SpeedStep, don't we?

I have just messed around with an old Lenovo T61 laptop, and tried to get SAC running on the thing. The first thing I did was going into the bios and disabling all the power throttling stuff including SpeedStep, as that had been included in all SAC-tweaking guides I have ever seen - and it makes good sense!
After doing all the other tweaks and installing SAC I had a very stable system, but the CPU usage was quite high even with a moderate number of channels and plugins activated. The pc has a 2.6 GHz Dual Core 2 processor so it's not lightning fast, but I expected a little better performance from it.
As I was trying to tweak things I installed ThrottleStop and to my surprise ThrottleStop showed me that my CPU was running at 1.3 GHz! I then went back to the bios, activated SpeedStep and chose "Maximum performance mode" (in a sub menu to SpeedStep) and now I have the CPU running stable at 2.6 GHz!

So generally SpeedStep should be disabled, but not always!

Peter,

In all honesty, most tweak recommendations should be taken on a "system-by-system" manner.

Unless we are using the same identical hardware and software, there are simply too many variables involved.

The key - at least to me and my understanding of things, is to have enough of a foundation to support comparisons. For this, I used disk imaging, so that I am able to return to a state prior to making further tweaks to my system.

At the same time, Bob's tweaks are, for the most art, enough for most to abide by.

So, with regards to SpeedStep, 1) you need to know that this option exists, and 2) you then test this out as to whether or not it should be enabled or disabled.

Interesting Peter. I would never have guessed that would happen. I wonder if it's another feature of the bios or something.

I have Speedstep disabled on all my audio machines but I'll have to check my old dualcore laptop to see if that's running optimally.

Thanks for sharing.

That is interesting. I played around with Speedstep while setting up a Lenovo desktop for SAW/SAC. I seem to remember that it didn't seem to make a difference. I will have to check to see if I left it on.

Angie,

I have had the same experience with some Lenovo's and some Dell systems as well.

Interestingly, these have all been corporate-grade systems. So, not too sure of the consumer-grade systems?